Friday, January 6, 2017

Astroneer Preview (XONE)

No Man’s Sky minus hype equals Astroneer. No Man’s Sky was a disappointment more
because it

didn’t meet gamers’ expectations rather than because it was actually
a bad game. It wasn’t what was
promised, so people got mad about it.
Astroneer, a game currently in the preview / early access program on
Steam and Xbox One, offers the same space exploration ambitions and freedom,
and even the endless resource collecting, of No Man’s Sky, but without the
years of hype and broken promises. Astroneer
still has a ways to go, though, as it is still in a pre-alpha state, but the
potential for greatness is evident. See
our full Xbox One Astroneer preview for more.

Astroneer is currently an Xbox Game Preview title, which
means it is far from finished and still pretty rough. By paying the $20 MSRP you acknowledge that it might not ever
actually be finished and you are fine with the current state of the game. Xbox Game Preview FAQ

In Astroneer you play as a little astronaut that has landed
on a procedurally generated 3D planet and has to find resources to build up a
base, explore the planet, and eventually make a spaceship so they can travel to
another planet and do it all over again.
Yeah, it’s just like No Man’s Sky, but the way you do things is a little
different in Astroneer.

Equipped with a nifty vacuum gun that both sucks and blows,
you can suck up resources and instantly dig massive holes in the ground like
you’re playing Minecraft or reverse the flow and easily build up bridges and
structures however you like. You can’t
freely explore right away, however, as your astronaut only has a limited amount
of oxygen and power so you can’t stray too far from your base. Instead, you have to build little tether
pylons that extend a lifeline from your base out to wherever you want to
go. As long as you’re connected to the
tether system you have oxygen and power and can do anything you want. You can also, eventually, build bigger
oxygen tanks, a wind turbine to keep your batteries charged, and lots of other
things to make exploration possible, like building vehicles(!), but at first
you’re somewhat limited. That’s fine,
though, as the slow burn of learning how to play the game and building up to
the good stuff is part of what makes survival and exploration games like this
fun in the first place.

As I mentioned, though, the game is still pretty early in
development and there are some rough edges.
At this point there is no tutorial whatsoever so figuring out how to do
anything, what different build options do, where to find specific resources,
and simply how to survive are pretty much up to trial and error. You have to figure it out as you go, which
can be somewhat frustrating as the first several hours you spend with the game
don’t exactly go smoothly. Once you do
figure some things out and can actually start really exploring, it gets better.

A bigger issue at this point in Astroneer’s development,
however, is that the controls and interface are pretty awful on Xbox One. The game was clearly designed to be played
with a mouse and keyboard and will need some fairly substantial tweaks to be
acceptable with a controller. What do I
mean? Well, when you use the vacuum gun
you just sort of move a cursor around and it sucks or blows wherever the cursor
is, but the cursor is so sensitive and feels so awful that it takes a long time
to get used to it. I’d much rather have
just a normal simple third-person-shooter aiming reticle. The interface and inventory management are
also less than optimal as things aren’t just automatically picked up and used
like you’d expect. You have to manually
select everything with a cursor, open your backpack, and then physically place
the item into a slot on your backpack.
And to use an item it is the same process in reverse. It is clunky and awkward and feels bad, to
say the least. I’m sure it all feels
fine with a M&K, but it doesn’t work very well on a gamepad.

That is one thing No Man’s Sky was successful at – making
things intuitive and accessible even though the scale and complexity of the
game was massive. Astroneer still needs
some work in that area.

The good news is that Astroneer is still technically in
pre-alpha, which means there is a lot of time to make changes and fixes before
the game is actually released for real.
What that means currently, however, is that I don’t think I’d recommend
you buy the Xbox Game Preview version of the game quite yet. It can be fun and you can learn to deal with
the controls as they are now, but I think it is probably a much better plan to
wait a few months for some updates to come out that will, hopefully, address
the control complaints. The whole point
of the game preview program is so developers can get feedback and make their
games better, so I’m optimistic, and confident even, that the developers at
System Era Softworks will get things polished up before too long.